Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/77

58 5. Ow has two sounds—(1) as an unaccented final, as o in bone. This is also its sound when it occurs without any consonant, in the possessive pronoun ow, my, and the participle particle ow; (2) in other cases it sounds as ou in you, and rarely as ow in now.

6. Ou has the same sound as û, and as the second sound of ow. It is the regular symbol for that sound in Breton, and very commonly in the Cornish dramas, where, as in Breton, u commonly represented, approximately, the French u, which later became î or ew.

In the Middle Cornish manuscripts the vowels are represented in various ways, and there is a special uncertainty about unaccented and obscure vowels.

Vowels were sometimes lengthened by doubling, or by adding a y, and rarely, until Jordan's Creation, by adding a mute e after the closing consonant; but often quantity was not indicated at all.

'Long î (ee in see) was more often than not represented by y, but, as in Welsh, y not infrequently represented the obscure vowel (u in until), and often a sound which later became a short e, but in unaccented syllables was, as is not unusually the case in English, more of the nature of the obscure vowel, or perhaps something between that and a short i. Indeed all unaccented vowels tend to become obscure, very much as they do in English, and hence are variously expressed.

The u of the earlier MSS. probably once represented approximately the French u or the German ü, the u of Devon and East Cornwall English, or the ao of Scottish Gaelic, not exactly the same sounds, but very near to each other. As in Greek and Welsh, this sound approached nearer and nearer to î (ee in seen), until in